Ooh, shiny

He definitely did, but since the whole book is supposed to be a translation of something he found and not something he personally wrote, they’re switched for the audience’s convenience. There’s a lot more to it, but here’s a chart of Shire months from the appendices at the end of RoTK. Elves and men are different, but there was no handy chart.

*gently sets phone on counter*

*walks away*

comes back with a sledgehammer*

When my grandfather was in hospice care dying of liver cancer, my godfather was quite ill also. It took him great effort to make the journey to see his dying friend. As he came into the room, supported by a family member, he shuffled to my grandpa’s bedside and silently handed him a dollar bill. He was ceding his loss of the bet, as they both knew who was going first. My grandpa had been in quite bad shape for a while and was no longer able to speak but let me tell you he snatched that dollar with unexpected strength and literally laughed aloud. He knew exactly what the gesture meant and he couldn’t help but find the humor within the grief. It was the last time any of us heard my grandpa laugh, as he passed shortly after.

easy mode: Gimli (makes a lot of noise himself, very easy to sneak up on)

medium mode: Boromir (challenging enough to be great fun)

hard more: Aragorn (VERY attentive to his surroundings)

Legolas: *sitting around minding his own business*

Frodo: *two inches from his ear* hi Legolas what’s up

Legolas: ANDAGNDOAHGDLKHNKDLFHLKFDANGLKFDAGN????? *backflips to his feet in confusion*

*cue the rest of the fellowship losing their fucking minds*

a picnic of hobbits

Why did Gandalf randomly decide that a plump gentle-hobbit was the right person to be a burglar for an adventuring party? It seems like wizardly eccentricity, until you realize Bilbo’s got a racial bonus to Stealth of like +20. Why does he get the Ring? In text, it’s partly coincidence, but also - which party member do you give your Ring of Invisibility to? The Rogue with a crazy Stealth bonus, of course. Bilbo uses his Stealth, boosted by the Ring, constantly, and the dwarves would have been dead a dozen times over without it. He’s able to get the Ring in the first place because he stealthed out of the middle of a horde of goblins. Then he’s sneaking up inches from trolls, secretly living inside the elves’ freakin palace (with Legolas) for months, rescuing a whole pack of dwarves from under the elves’ noses, regularly pick-pocketing people including elves, sneaking past a dragon, sneaking to deliver the Arkenstone.

Then we follow up into Lord of the Rings. Gandalf’s now bred up a second-generation Rogue. Frodo, Sam, Pippin, and Merry have that same massive racial Stealth bonus, and Frodo also has been raised by an adventurer. He speaks Elvish fluently, he’s friends with dwarves, he studies maps obsessively. Then he inherits Bilbo’s Stealth-boosting magic item - now upgraded to cursed McGuffin. When Gandalf decides it’s time, he collects Frodo and assembles a party. Their goal isn’t to march into Mordor, or to battle the Boss: it’s to sneak through enemy lines, past an entire army (or two).

The humans, elf, dwarf, and wizard angel keep drawing too much attention and getting them attacked (plus admittedly Pippin, the low-WIS darling), so eventually Frodo and Sam ditch them and head off on a pure stealth run. They can’t use the Ring of Invisibility anymore, but fortunately Galadriel gave them another Stealth-boosting magic item, the cloaks. They sneak halfway across Middle-Earth, past armies, through miles and miles of enemy territory, while being hunted by every evil being on the planet, particularly a literal giant All-Seeing Eye. Not to mention the Palantiri, extremely powerful divination items which are being actively used by three different groups of enemies/competitors.

The other main canonical Hobbit power is that they’re “very hardy folk”, meaning they have incredibly high resistance to various things from poison to mental influence. So they can survive the literally poisonous air and water of Mordor, which was designed to kill every species but orcs. And they can survive close contact with the Ring for decades or centuries, not only physically but also maintaining some degree of mental independence, when any other race would succumb in minutes to hours. (Note the most “powerful” characters - Elrond, Galadriel, the literal angel Gandalf - refuse to even touch the Ring, as do the most morally sound, Aragorn and Faramir.)

Why did Gandalf choose a minor member of the country gentry, the size of a toddler, with no combat training, to save Middle-Earth? Because absolutely no other creature on the planet could have done the task. Frodo was all but created as a weapon against Sauron. He, and he alone (with Sam), was capable of saving Middle-Earth.

Canonically, The Ring’s whole thing is that it enhances the pre-existing abilities of whomever wears it, in addition to driving them insane. This is why it would be so devastating for Gandalf, or Galadriel, etc to get their hands on it. They’re already super powerful, the buff would make them unstoppable.

And the stealth thing is established really early on in the Hobbit as the thing hobbits were amazing at. It would kick ass as a detail for The Ring to only turn Hobbits invisible. Among other points, it enhances the plot-point of Gandalf not being able to recognize the thing and then after his suspicions were raised taking so much time studying ring-lore before he could. If The Ring only turned Hobbits invisible, then Gandalf literally has nothing to go off of for identifying the damn thing until he’s gotten his PHD in Ring-ology. Which is canonically what it took for him to figure it out.

This is still plausible without the alteration to The Ring’s exact properties, but I feel that the narrative is a bit stronger with it.

Amusingly, as far as I can tell its also canon-compliant.

What the fuck does that mean, didn’t I already say that Isildur is canonically turned invisible by The Ring? Ah, but you misunderstand the nature of Tolkien’s canon. The Hobbit exists within the fiction of The Hobbit. It is written by Bilbo, with Tolkien himself merely translating it from Westron to modern English. The Lord of The Rings is compiled by Frodo, the Silmarillion is a Noldor history book.

We know that The Ring turned Isildur invisible because of how he died; his party was ambushed on the road by orcs. Isildur donned The Ring and leapt into the river to escape. But The Ring betrayed him, enlarging itself on his finger and falling off, thus allowing the orcs to see him and fill him with arrows.

Except.

That’s the translation of what happened, and we don’t know how reliable the original source was in any case. Recall that ordinary humans are already remarkably resistant to death by injuries that would fell other creatures, and Isidur was a full-blooded Numenorean besides. It is entirely plausible that The Rings enhancement of these properties would make Isildur very difficult to kill indeed. Maybe he was already full of arrows when he went into the River, but his wounds only became fatal retroactively, with the loss of The Ring.

Perhaps the “original text” Watsonian-Tolkien was translating more simply indicated that Isildur went into the river, was betrayed by The Ring, and this caused his immediate death-by-arrows. Watsonian-Tolkien could, in this case, be forgiven for assuming that it was a matter of loosing the invisibility which The Ring emparts to so many Hobbits in the texts Watsonian-Tolkien has read which led to Isildur’s death.

Friendly reminder that Queer is approved by 72.9% of the people, and the groups who don’t prefer it’s use as an umbrella term are straight people, exclusionists, transmeds, truscums, sex-negative people, and sex work critical people (x).

Friendly reminder that aros and aces are excluded only 9.2% / 8.1% of the time respectively while being included  78.9% / 81.2% of the time (x)

“You have some queer friends, Dorothy”, and she replies, “The queerness doesn’t matter, so long as they’re friends.”

me: Okay!

The textile book: Clothes separate the vulnerable human body from the conditions of the outside world, and in doing so absorb the sweat and debris of human existence, accumulating wear and tear according to the lives we live. In this way, various lifestyles and professions are represented by clothing, and the clothing of a loved one retains the imprint of their physical body and their life being lived, as though the clothes absorb part of the wearer’s soul

Me: …oh

The textile book: The process of weaving a garment and the process of a child being formed in its mother’s womb are often referred to using the same language. Likewise, when a baby is born, a blanket or other textile material is the first material object it encounters and protects it. Textiles can create the idea of two things being inextricable, as with being “woven together,” or can create the sense of separateness, as with a curtain or veil that separates two rooms or spaces, even separating the living from the dead, or separating two realities, such as a performance ending when the curtain falls

Me: …oh God

The textile book: Odysseus’s wife Penelope undid her weaving in secret every night to delay the advances of her suitors. In this way she was able to turn back the passage of time to allow her husband to come home. Likewise the Lakota tell a story of an old woman embroidering time by embroidering a robe with porcupine quills. If she finishes the embroidery, the world will come to an end, but her faithful dog pulls out the quills whenever her back is turned, turning back the clock and allowing existence to continue.

me: …is…is…is that why we refer to the fabric of space and time?

The textile book: The technological revolution of textile making is sadly underappreciated. The textile arts are possibly the most fundamental human technology, as once people created string and rope, they could create nets for catching fish and small animals, and bags and baskets for carrying food. In the earliest prehistoric times, the first string or cord perhaps came from sinew, found in the body of an animal. Because of this perhaps the body of a living being could be understood as made of a textile material. Indeed textiles have the function of preserving life, as with a surgeon stitching back together the human body or bandages being placed on a wound. Textile technologies are being used to create life-changing implants to restore function to injured parts of the body, as though a muscle or tendon can be woven and made in this way. Cloth can be used to create a parachute that will save a human’s life as they plummet out of the sky. Ultimately, the textile technologies are used to enter new parts of the universe. [Photo of an astronaut and details explaining the astronaut’s suit]